One-on-one fighters were all the rage throughout the 90s. Street Fighter II and the sequels that followed were generally considered the pinnacle of the genre, but there were many worthwhile challengers released by developers other than Capcom. Street Combat is not one of these; it’s actually quite the opposite. Publisher Irem best known for releasing highly revered classics such as R-Type wanted to release a fighting game in the West to try and cash in on the genre’s popularity. They settled on a title released in Japan based on the Ranma 1/2 anime/manga franchise. Because this intellectual property was largely unknown to Western audiences the publisher decided to Americanize by re-designing all of the characters and completely changing the story. The end result is Street Combat which has the distinction of being one of the very worst fighting games released for the platform. I only wish that I was exaggerating.
I’m only at the start of this review and things are already terrible. The storyline is one of the worst in fighting game history. It goes a little something like this; you play as a character named Steven who is participating in a martial arts tournament. Matches are carried out in simple one-on-one fashion with six different opponents (including the final boss). When you reach the end you’re treated to a single screen ending sequence that’s just as awful as the rest of the game; the only relief it brings is knowing that this trainwreck of a game is now officially over. Now we get to the fun part. For some unfathomable reason you’re only given the choice between two characters, and they’re actually the same guy. You can play as Steven either with or without armor, and that’s it for your choices of playable characters. That’s absolutely pathetic for a title released in 1993 on the Super Nintendo, but even ignoring this caveat Street Combat has some major problems. First of all let’s discuss the fighting engine. It’s one of the worst and most awkward gameplay systems I’ve ever seen in this genre. Characters animate very poorly which makes the whole game feel very robotic and laborious to play. To make matters worse the controls are extremely unresponsive.
Street Combat suffers from some absolutely horrendous levels of input lag. It feels like the game needs to load each animation before you can move. Each time you press a button there’s a split second wait period which throws off all possibilities for pulling off any sort of combination attacks. To make matters worse it also screws up your ability to perform special moves, but these are so limited and barebones that they’re hardly worth using at all in the first place. Street Combat even manages to break one of the cardinal sins of bad fighting games. You cannot jump by pressing up, and instead this is designated to a face button. Why they made this decision is beyond me, but it manages to fudge up the fighting engine even more by taking away an attack button and also going against the norm. There’s absolutely nothing unique in this package; you don’t have finishing moves, ring outs, nothing. I imagine the Japanese version of this title banked entirely on the use of the Ranma franchise, and without it we’re left with the mess that is Street Combat.
The character roster here is absolutely deplorable. The artists didn’t go with one single art style, and instead used a whole mess of them while designing the fighters. Let’s start with Steven. He has a blonde mullet, sun glasses, and wears blue armor like the main character of Street Fighter 2010. His other design is virtually the same but with different sun glasses and no armor. He looks atrocious, and the color palette reeks of 90s super hero in the absolute worst kind of way. The opponents you’ll face include a rocket board riding robot, the villainous nemesis in red tights, a spiky haired strong man samurai, an angry looking clown, and a generic ninja girl. The lineup is entirely awful, and the characters are all drawn with a minimal amount of care. Just about the only thing that’s interesting about them is the fact that your character has a final line of dialogue after the match which varies depending on which opponent you’ve just defeated. Street Combat features one of the most genuinely awful line-ups of characters in any fighting game ever.
The graphics are just bad in general. I mentioned the awful character designs earlier, but it can’t be covered enough. The roster makes Street Combat look like a parody game, but even if it was one it wouldn’t be particularly clever. They all look just terribly generic and are ultimately forgettable; it’s like World Heroes had a baby with Eternal Champions. Then there’s the color palette. You’ve got more turquoise and pink than the opening sequence to Saved By The Bell. This title reeks of the worst parts of the early nineties. On a positive note the backgrounds are actually pretty decent in most cases. This is one area that, to the best of my knowledge, Irem didn’t change from the original release. Some feature multiple layers, and even really nice parallax scrolling. It’s by no means game saving, but the backgrounds are slightly impressive. On the other hand the soundtrack is just awful. It sounds like something that a C-tier developer would put out on the Genesis by randomly mashing the keyboard. There’s not a single memorable track here. The sound effects are even worse with an off-putting arrangement of hits and grunts. You’re really best off keeping the volume down low for this one. Heck, might as well not even turn the television on.
